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Review
. 2011 Mar 22:1380:175-86.
doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2010.09.061. Epub 2010 Sep 22.

Bridging the gap between MRI and postmortem research in autism

Cynthia Mills Schumann  1 , Christine Wu Nordahl
Affiliations
Review

Bridging the gap between MRI and postmortem research in autism

Cynthia Mills Schumann et al. Brain Res. .

Abstract

Autism is clearly a disorder of neural development, but when, where, and how brain pathology occurs remain elusive. Typical brain development is comprised of several stages, including proliferation and migration of neurons, creation of dendritic arbors and synaptic connections, and eventually dendritic pruning and programmed cell death. Any deviation at one or more of these stages could produce catastrophic downstream effects. MRI studies of autism have provided important clues, describing an aberrant trajectory of growth during early childhood that is both present in the whole brain and marked in specific structures such as the amygdala. However, given the coarse resolution of MRI, the field must also look towards postmortem human brain research to help elucidate the neurobiological underpinnings of MRI volumetric findings. Likewise, studies of postmortem tissue may benefit by looking to the findings from MRI studies to narrow hypotheses and target specific brain regions and subject populations. In this review, we discuss the strengths, limitations, and major contributions of each approach to autism research. We then describe how they relate and what they can learn from each other. Only by integrating these approaches will we be able to fully explain the neuropathology of autism.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A depiction of the various levels of detail provided by MRI images and postmortem human brain tissue. At the top of the image, the sagittal rendering from a high-resolution T1-weighted MRI depicts the location of A) three coronal slices at the levels, moving in the caudal to rostral direction, of the cerebellum, amygdala, and frontal cortex B) Each coronal slice is magnified to depict the resolution of a single 1mm3 voxel. C) Nissl stained sections from postmortem human brain tissue portrays the organization and morphology of cell bodies. D) At higher magnification; individual cell bodies can be seen. Scale bar indicates 1mm; note though that 1mm of tissue is not equivalent to 1mm in MRI section due to shrinkage of tissue during processing.
Figure 2
Figure 2
A–C depicts cell body-stained sections of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex at 1, 6 and 24 months of age. Below each is a representative Golgi-stained section showing the extent of dendritic growth in this same cortical area over these same ages (from Conel 1939-1959, The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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